Clarion-Ledger

Bobby Cherry's ex-wife testifies that Cherry told her he bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963. Cherry, now 71 and on trial here charged with murder in the explosion, denied in a 1999 interview that he told Brogdon or anyone else he had a role in the Sept. 15, 1963, bombing of the church that became a center for civil rights protests and activities.

Three suspects implicated in the infamous killings of three civil rights workers in 1964 took part in a similar Klan kidnapping of a black teen three weeks earlier, a Klansman-turned-FBI informant says.

In the 1988 fiction film Mississippi Burning there was a scene in which FBI agents conceal the identity of a key witness by placing a cardboard box over his head with one hole that allows him to see. That really happened to 19-year-old Wilmer Faye Jones, who directed FBI agents to an abandoned farm in Neshoba County where Klansmen had discussed killing him on June 2, 1964.

The Clarion-Ledger has obtained correspondence Rainey and Price received at the sheriff's office in 1964. The never-published letters arrived amid the maelstrom of the civil rights movement, documenting a nation torn apart by hate.

A special Alabama grand jury indicted Thomas Blanton Jr., 61, of Birmingham, and Bobby Cherry, 69, of Mabank, Texas, on four counts of murder each in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. The two former Ku Klux Klansmen surrendered Wednesday on murder charges.